A High-Level Abstraction of Shared Accesses
In The ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 18(1): 1-36, 2000.
Pete Keleher
Abstract:
We describe the design and use of the tape mechanism, a new high-level abstraction of accesses to shared data for software DSMs. Tapes consolidate and generalize a number of recent protocol optimizations, including update-based locks and record-replay barriers. Tapes are usually created by "recording" shared accesses. The resulting recordings can be used to anticipate future accesses by tailoring data movement to application semantics. Tapes-based mechanisms are layered on top of existing shared memory protocols, and are largely independent of the underlying memory model. Tapes can also be used to emulate the data-movement semantics of several update-based protocol implementations, without altering the underlying protocol implementation.We have used tapes to create the Tapeworm synchronization library. Tapeworm implements sophisticated record/replay mechanisms across barriers, augments locks with data movement semantics, and allows the use of producer-consumer segments, which move entire modified segments when any portion of the segment is accessed. We show that Tapeworm eliminates 85% of remote misses, reduces message traffic by 63%, and improves performance by an average of 29% for our application suite.
@article{keleher-tocs00,
title = "A High-Level Abstraction of Shared Accesses",
author = "Pete Keleher",
journal = {The ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)},
pages = {1-36},
volume = {18},
issue = {1},
year = {2000},
}
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